‘Have you seen any of the family since we left Gatehouse?’ I asked, knowing he had and wanting to know more.
‘Yes, indeed,’ said Alec. ‘Lena is still away of course, but I spent the day with Clemence yesterday. She’s bearing up terribly well, and I took three good friends of Cara to visit which I’m sure helped. She seemed very much soothed by them.’
That explained it, I thought. Clemence could not withstand the combined efforts of Koo, Booty and Sha-sha (who could?), hence the presence on my bedside table of the leather volume. I could bet, though, that Clemence would be anything but soothed to reflect on having let it out of her clutches, and if she knew it was here with me she would be having absolute kittens.
‘Dreadful, dreadful thing,’ said Hugh, and we fell silent. Just as well, perhaps, since we were having mutton and if one does not shut up and eat it while it is hot, especially in a chilly place like our dining room, it can congeal quite horribly before one is halfway done.
I fetched the album down to the drawing room when I left the dinner table, and was sitting staring at the picture of Cara on the landing when the door opened. Hugh and I rarely sat together after dinner and I had expected Alec and him to return to the library. Indeed I was beginning to despair of getting a chance to talk to Alec at all, knowing that he should be out at the stables the next day, but here was a piece of good luck: Alec entered the drawing room alone.
‘Hugh asks you to excuse him, but he has work that must be done tonight. Something about a contractor? And asks me to excuse him, and asks me to ask you to excuse him to me, and generally wants us to spend the evening apologizing to each other on his behalf. Are there contractors?’
‘There are certainly drains,’ I said. ‘I rather thought it was clearing, which would suggest plumbers, but it may have been building, so contractors might be indicated.’
‘Or perhaps he just can’t face it,’ said Alec. ‘I’ve noticed people simply not knowing what to say to me.’
I poured him some coffee and decided to indulge in a little straight talking.
‘People don’t know, Alec dear. That is, they don’t know – and I didn’t myself if it comes to that – how you are taking the whole thing. You don’t seem perturbed. And it’s not -’ I said, holding up my hand to stop him interrupting, ‘it’s not because you know she’s not dead, before you say that. Because it was exactly the same when you thought she was. Bluntly, no one wants to extend the hand of sympathy for a sorrow you don’t appear to be suffering.’
Alec came and sat on the other end of the sofa; I think so that he might speak without having to look at me.
‘It wasn’t a great romance, if you must know.’ He spoke with a quiet, hard deliberation as though pushing the words out of himself as one forces notes from a brass horn. ‘But I liked her. Well, you know Cara, Dandy – she’s impossible not to like. And she seemed to like me, although I admit she seems to like everyone, so I can’t feel too flattered.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She’s that rare thing: an absolute darling who doesn’t make one sick. Less so recently, perhaps. More troubled. But generally, one would rather wonder why she wasn’t engaged long ago than marvel at her being so now.’
‘Quite,’ said Alec. ‘So I daresay I should think myself lucky she didn’t want a great romance any more than I did. We should have been happy, though, I’m sure. For one thing we had known each other all our lives, or known of each other at least, and that’s a start.’
‘Yes, you’re a distant relation, aren’t you?’ I said, only now remembering that someone had told me this. ‘And so were you always meant for Cara? From the cradle? Very touching.’
‘What a Victorian you are,’ said Alec, laughing. ‘From the cradle, indeed! Cara was just a cousin in Canada as far as I was concerned.’
But there was a shifty defiance about the way he spoke despite the laughter, and I knew he was rattled, embarrassed by more than just my teasing, and I remembered something he had mentioned lightly just in passing.
‘The mystery you hinted at, to do with Cara’s settlement? Have you any idea what it was?’
I was lucky again; Alec laughed so hard and so long this time that I could not help but join in.
‘You should have seven daughters, Dandy, instead of your sons. Talk about Lady Bracknell! But to answer the question… I always imagined that Gregory was to settle everything he could on Clemence and felt he couldn’t tell me this outright.’
‘Why on earth would you think that?’ I said. ‘Cara is by far his favourite, so much so that I feel sorry for Clemence sometimes.’
Alec turned to face me, to enjoy the look he was about to put on my face.
‘I rather thought he would settle what he could on Clemence because Dunelgar, Culreoch and the London house are coming to me. I’m Gregory’s heir.’
I choked on my coffee.
‘How too Mr Collins for words,’ I said at last, and luckily Alec gave another bark of laughter instead of slamming out of the room as I should have deserved.
‘What an idea! What things you do say, Dandy! No, I didn’t quite resolve to “make my choice from among his daughters” – although you’ve no idea what the girls in Dorset would have thought of moving to the Highlands; they shrank away at parties when they found out. Broke into a run, some of them. Anyway, as it turned out, my elder brother… And so I might have stayed in Dorset after all.’ He laughed again, but this time absolutely mirthlessly, and went on in a loud, blustering voice with a small tremble at the back of it that made me want to take him on to my lap like one of my sons. ‘Since I was getting Gregory’s pile, I convinced my father to settle on my younger brother after Edward was killed. Now what do you bet Gregory changes his mind and I end my days in a home for old soldiers?’
‘But could he change his mind?’ I said. ‘Isn’t it an entail?’
‘Liferent,’ said Alec. ‘I don’t think you get entails up here, do you?’ I shrugged. ‘Meaning he can’t sell them but must pass them on along the male line. So, more or less an entail really, except that it needn’t be me.’
‘But you’re an Osborne,’ I said. ‘Not a Duffy. How can you be male line? I’ve never understood how Mr Collins can be Mr Bennet’s male heir, come to that.’
‘My grandfather, Gregory’s father’s brother, married a Miss Osborne,’ said Alec. ‘She was an only child and so, much to the delight of her family although to the disgust of his own…’
‘He changed his name?’ I was laughing again.
‘It’s not so unusual really,’ said Alec. ‘Much commoner than you’d think.’ He was looking away from me again and seemed defiant.
‘No!’ I said. ‘Darling, tell me you weren’t going to!’
Alec had the grace to look sheepish.
‘As I say, when there’s land or loot hanging on it, it’s not as unusual as you’d think. And in my case I’d be changing back anyway, to what I should have been if my grandfather hadn’t been swayed by the Osbornes.’
‘I suppose so,’ I said. I thought about all of this for a moment, wondering if it had any bearing on the case. ‘It’s all very dynastic,’ I concluded.
‘To tell the truth,’ said Alec, ‘I hardly thought about it until after the war. When I went off to the front, Lena and Gregory might easily have had a son of their own and I might easily have not come back.’
‘Yes,’ I said, sobered. ‘In 1914, Lena can barely have been forty and the girls were still children. I suppose because they had the two of them so quickly and so close together and then no more, one doesn’t think of it. But look at Queen Victoria.’
‘Exactly,’ said Alec. ‘So it was only when I came to visit a year or two ago that I really began to believe in it.’
‘And you met Cara again, and your eyes locked over the estate accounts and -’